Facebook: 20 Million Small Businesses Have Pages, Small Fraction Are Advertisers

Facebook has reached another milestone: 20 million small businesses are using Facebook Pages. But only a small fraction of those are spending money on any of Facebook’s ad products.

That’s the word from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who shared the data during today’s Q3 earnings call. The company’s report focused, as it is usually does, on mobile and user growth, but small business growth is no less important and — from a business perspective — perhaps more important.

Sandberg also revealed that Facebook had about one million advertisers during Q3.

“It’s really hard to get small businesses to use technology products,” Sandberg said today about the 20 million Page milestone, “and we haven’t done many aggressive efforts to make that happen.”

That actually depends on your definition of the word “many.” For the past 18 months or so, Facebook has been doing feet-on-the-street outreach in small towns, in an attempt to introduce small businesses to Facebook’s products.

Converting Page Users To Advertisers

With 20 million Pages, but only a million advertisers, Sandberg conceded that “only a small fraction” of the Page owners are advertising on Facebook, and that’s something the company wants to change.

“In an advertiser base of over a million advertisers,” Sandberg said, “a great majority of those are small- and medium-sized businesses. We plan on getting better at converting them to advertisers.”

She said that Facebook’s future plans will focus on tools that attract new small business advertisers and make it easy for them to advertise.

“We’ll continue to focus on the automated tools that help them. We need a simpler product. It will help us gain more advertisers and help them reach customers more efficiently.”

Facebook’s 20 million Page count represents worldwide usage and reflects Pages added to business categories, as well as the Cause/Community Page category. During its Q2 earnings call, Facebook said it had 18 million Pages.